


Bloodcircle

by tb_ll57



Series: A Brother Is Born For Adversity [4]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Consent Issues, Dark(ish) Lupin, Death Eaters, Gap Filler, Identity Issues, M/M, Order of the Phoenix (Harry Potter), Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Second War with Voldemort, Spies & Secret Agents, Trust Issues, Undecided Relationship(s), Werewolf Conspiracies, Werewolf Culture, Werewolf Turning, Werewolves, animagi
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-07-09
Updated: 2018-09-29
Packaged: 2018-11-15 19:43:39
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 4
Words: 20,380
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11237886
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tb_ll57/pseuds/tb_ll57
Summary: The war is begun in earnest. The Order does what it can to stem the tide-- and Dumbledore sends his spies into the field. Remus returns to the werewolves in hope of keeping them from joining the Dark. Whatever good that will do.





	1. Prologue

**Author's Note:**

> _I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness_
> 
> ~Howl, by Allen Ginsberg

The press already had a name for it. _Battle for the Department of Mysteries._

Their snaps of the aftermath showed Harry standing there, dazed and exhausted, Dumbledore's hand on his shoulder. Sirius Black had Potter's other side, proud and strong as he faced off the very reporters who'd once called for his head, named him a Death Eater, named Harry crazy and attention-seeking and named Dumbledore his puppet-handler. Vindication in print, that was. The whole of Wizarding Britain knew Sirius was innocent, now, knew Harry had told the truth all along, knew Dumbledore alone had seen the future coming, and prepared.

Bill's newspaper collected splatters of wet that bled the ink. 'Cheers!' Kingsley shouted over his head, popping the cork of a bottle of bubbly with a fizzy overflow, and the Order of the Phoenix raised a ragged hurrah.

Grimmauld Place had never been so lively. All the lamps were lit, the fire stoked high in the hearth, and someone had been about conjuring bunting all over the library and popping crackers and hanging fairy lights as if they were in a proper festival, Christmas and all the holidays combined. Victory Day. It wasn't winning the war, not by a long shot, but this was a victory, this was a win, mission accomplished. They'd trained for this day, they'd waited, vigilant, for this battle, and now they had their proof it was all worth it.

'To Dumbledore!' Moody toasted, raising high a glass with a mad grin on his blood-streaked face.

'To Harry Potter!' Kingsley echoed, and the cry went up all around, shrill in that too-bright room, cutting through Bill's head like glass, and he winced, he flinched away from it--

'Here.' Something icy cool came down on his skin. Bill sagged into the welcome relief of mint and camphor. Remus knelt beside Bill's chair, one hand on his knee, the other holding the compress to Bill's shredded cheek. 'Should help with the burning. Not much else will.'

'We match,' Bill said, brushing a numb finger through the air at Remus's ear. The faint white lines of old scars had taken decades to fade. Bill's would be vivid and red and inescapable. 'Werewolf wounds. They don't heal right.'

'No.' Remus rescued Bill's wavering hand. He cradled it gently. 'I don't know if it was brave or foolish, going up against Greyback alone.'

'I didn't see anyone else available for back-up.' Bill clenched Remus's hand til he could feel it. It took longer than it should have. 'We weren't there to run away or wait for help. Will I-- will I turn?'

'Turn?'

'The full moon's only two days away.'

Remus shook his head. 'No,' he said quietly. 'You won't be like him. It'll hurt for a while, it'll scar. You're still you. Budge up.' Bill shifted his legs off the ottoman, and Remus sat himself. 'Your parents are at St Mungo's. The children are all right, or will be. Ron's got the Weasley streak. Mad luck in the face of disaster. It's too public for Harry just now, Dumbledore will... Dumbledore will take him back to Hogwarts, he said, bring a healer to him.'

'Poor lad.'

Remus's eyes came up to Bill's. 'Harry's not ready for this.'

'No-one expects him to be.'

'No?' Remus smiled. It made bitter lines to either side of his mouth. 'Aspirin,' he said then. 'For the headache. Stay away from the champagne. Water or tea for you, Mr Weasley.'

The bang of the front door and the wail of Lady Black's perpetually hacked-off portrait accompanied the arrival of the rest of the Order of the Phoenix. 'Shut it, you old hag,' Sirius bellowed back, and someone drew the curtains, but that was the least of the chaos. Babbling voices, bits of news hollered back and forth-- the Wizengamot are holding an emergency session to re-instate Dumbledore!-- they've sacked the Senior Editor at the _Prophet_ , they say she knew all along and suppressed it-- the Unspeakables have come into the open, first time in a decade, they're saying the prophecy was real-- arrests-- vote of No Confidence for Fudge--

'Final count is MacNair, both Lestrange brothers, Dolohov, Crabbe, Nott, Jugson, all arrested and on their way to Azkaban as we speak,' Sirius announced, and a cheer went round again. Black grinned wildly through the mess of tangled hair, fierce and nearly crackling with energy. 'Remus takes the honour of Mulciber's death, haven't dulled a day, you old sod--'

'And Bellatrix Lestrange goes to Sirius!' Tonks shouted, and this time the cheer was near deafening, as the Order broke into applause. Sirius bowed flamboyantly, loosing an ecstatic laugh.

'I've wanted that mad bitch for fifteen years,' he crowed, and laughed again. 'Did you see her face? Couldn't believe it right to the very end!'

'Greyback's got away,' Bill said.

Remus nodded. 'Malfoy, Avery, too. Rookwood. The cleverer, stronger ones. Bellatrix... Bellatrix will be a loss. Symbolic. His lieutenant. But Malfoy would have been better. Malfoy's the money, the agents, the voice of sanity. I nearly had him. Would've had him, if Mulciber hadn't stepped in the bloody way.'

'If the Ministry finally wake up it doesn't matter. He can't skulk about paying people to undermine us anymore, not with his allegiance out in the open.'

'Oh, Bill.' It was Tonks, throwing herself to her knees at his chair. 'Oh, love, look at you. I heard you--' She pried the compress away from his cheek, grimacing at the bloody rents in his flesh. 'You pretty bastard, you've only gone and made yourself more dashing.'

'I'll give you two a moment,' Remus said, rising to go, but Tonks turned on him just as suddenly, throwing him back into place with a shove and pulling wide the neck of his shirt, ruthlessly squashing his attempts at modesty. 'The pair of you, just sitting about bleeding on the antiques. Hestia's bringing a Healer who can be trusted. Get this seen to.' She traced a circle around a clumsily healed score of hot raised wounds dappling Lupin's chest. 'Nearly lost you, didn't we.'

'I'm not so easily downed.' Remus tugged his shirt closed, blushing faintly, but it was Bill's gaze he avoided, not the handsome young woman with her hands on him. 'You, Nymphadora?'

'I loathe that name,' she complained, but smiling nonetheless. 'Tea, two sugars, innit?'

'Don't, you should sit, you've been--'

'Duelling for my life?' she finished archly. 'So've you been. You two sit tight, won't be a mo.'

'To be young.' Remus gave up attempting to call her back, she was already off, marching toward the kitchen. 'How long have you two...?'

Bill blinked. 'What?'

'Never mind, it's none of my business.'

'I rather thought she had it on for you, actually. And you saved her life today. I saw. She definitely did.'

'I can do without hero-worship.'

'Not the kind of worshipping I think she's into, mate.'

Remus looked away. 'I can take you back to your flat, if you like. Bring the healer your way when it's time. Or there's rooms upstairs, your mum's got most of the place cleared of the worst pests, give or take a boggart.'

'Here's fine. Not sure I've got another Apparation in me.' Bill made it to his feet, wobbling alarmingly. He'd fallen early in the fight, Greyback-- he shut his eyes. He ached. His face was a blaze of hurt. His knees shook like he'd had a jelly-legs curse, not just a man, one man, teeth bared leering down at him--

'I've got you,' Remus said quietly, and he did, arms tight and strong, holding him up. 'Don't open your eyes if you don't want. Just walk.'

There were stairs. He'd never have made it on his own power. Remus had killed a man and taken a real curse and Bill was acting like an invalid, but the shame wasn't stronger than the thudding shudder of his heartbeat, the jitter of nerves coming all to pieces. It was an interminable climb and it was only the space of a moment, and then he was being laid flat on a musty-smelling bed. The mattress dipped, Remus sitting next to him, but it seemed a long time later that Bill rolled his head on a limp pillow and found the other man leaning back against the headboard, his knees loosely clasped in the ring of his arms, an empty china teacup dangling from one finger. It was dark out the window, night, and the breeze blowing the stained lace curtains still carried the lingering scent of winter.

'How long was I out?' Bill asked groggily.

'A few hours.' Remus dropped a hand to Bill's head, checking him for fever the way Mum always did, forehead, cheek, other cheek. Other cheek. He was a tender touch, on the bandage that had somehow appeared on Bill's cheek. 'You've stopped bleeding. That's good.'

'I want, um.' Bill rubbed sand from his eyes. 'I want to see.'

'It will look worse than it is. You should wait.'

'No. I appreciate what you're saying, I do, but I just, I want to. Please.'

Remus left the bed. He was only gone a moment, crossing the creaky boards to the lady's vanity. He returned with a hand mirror, an ornate jewel-crusted thing that tingled oddly against Bill's palm. Remus took it away and wrapped it a kerchief. 'Silver,' he murmured. 'It won't burn you, but--'

'But you wanted to know if it would.' Bill stared at his hand in the dark. Stared at Remus's, blistered from even that short contact. He pushed the mirror down to the duvet, shoved it off the edge. It clattered to the floor.

'Good boy.'

'I'm not a boy. I'm very much not a boy.'

'Man,' Remus said, tolerant of his tantrum. 'Blooded man, after today. Your first battle.'

'I don't think I got much of him. Greyback.'

'No-one ever has.'

'You did,' Bill said. His throat was dry, his tongue like a sponge left sitting on the counter too long. 'My dad told me once, you kept the werewolves out of the war. All you.'

'Did I.' Remus sighed, a long slow exhale. 'Go to sleep, Bill, it's all right. It'll all be better in the morning.'

'Don't leave.' He latched on without knowing he meant to. Leg under his, thigh, hard muscle under his wide-spread fingers. His slid his hand over the curve of it to the softer inner juncture. His small finger travelled the ridge of Remus's fly, down, up. 'I'm not Tonks.'

'Bill.' Remus's voice was strained, restrained. 'You've had a shock today--'

'All the more reason to feel alive as possible.'

Warmth, over his hand. Covering him, or pressing him to the flesh beneath. Remus twined their fingers.

He sat up. He was the taller, by an inch or two, when they were standing, just enough taller now to lean down, a little, to tilt the other man's lips up to his. Stubble rasped against his chin, as they figured out how to fit each other, how to hold. Remus's arm laid along his shoulder, cupping the back of his head, and Bill pulled long legs over his lap, fumbled with the Muggle zip and the belt buckle and fitted his hand inside. It was all hushed soft breaths in his ear, the wet of their tongues sliding against each other. There had been kisses at Hogwarts, sex with dark-skinned beauties in Cairo on his first tour in Egypt, even the luxury of making love with someone who made his gut tingle and his heart sing, but this was, this was-- Remus was so careful of him, tenderly circling but always avoiding the wound on his face, pressing kisses across the bridge of his nose, the line of his jaw, to each delicate eyelid, before latching onto the lobe of his ear. The nip of teeth made him shiver--

_Greyback chewing on him. Greyback's teeth bloody, strips of Bill's skin caught in his incisors, grinning down at him._

Not like that. Remus nipped him, only, not even enough to pinch, and he unwound the buttons of Bill's shirt with economy and grace, and kissed his way down Bill's neck and shoulder and smoothed his hands over Bill's chest as if he were brushing silk flat, caressing him. Bill returned it with strokes to the hard length in his hand. He eased Remus back, shoving pillows out of his way, crawled backward on his knees and dragged down Remus's trousers with him, bared Remus to the calves, wrestled off his boots and hung Remus's legs from his shoulders. He wet two fingers sloppily and sent them questing as he swallowed Remus deep.

'Wait--'

No time to wait. He stretched himself fast, awkward with the angle of his arm reaching back, the band of his trousers and shorts restricting him even further. He didn't care. When Remus was hard in his mouth and bucking beneath him, Bill stripped himself with trembling hands and climbed onto Remus's lap. He mashed their mouths together as he pressed Remus to his hole and bore down.

'Oh, God,' Remus cried into Bill's hair, and held him, hugged him, clutched him close as Bill rolled his hips, rode him. 'God, Bill, God.'

He could hardly breathe. He could hardly breathe but in snatches, rubbed himself against Remus's furry stomach, rutted on him til he'd wormed that hard wonderful thing in him deep enough to touch the spot that made everything go fuzzy and white-hot and he just needed to keep in that moment, keep in that moment as long as possible, Remus whispering his name with reverence and telling him he was beautiful until he could almost believe it--

He teetered on the edge, all suddenly, and held himself there one long golden moment, Remus's eyes locked on his eyes, and then he let himself fall.

They lay together, cooling in the night breeze. Bill played lazily with a pair of stockinged toes at one end of the bed, the whorl of Remus's ear at the other. 'It helped,' he said, and the hand swooping up the line of his spine paused at the base of his neck, squeezed tenderly, and made its trail back down again.

'Who the hell are you, Bill Weasley,' Remus wondered, and kissed the top of his head.

A near miss. A curse-breaker who'd only barely escaped the one that couldn't be broken. A boy who'd gone running for comfort after a scare, though this wasn't a skinned knee and Remus was anything but his dad. A man who knew the Battle of the Department of Mysteries was the first of many, the first in a war, a man who knew enough to be wary, be weary of that, before it had even started. He wasn't a romantic. About that, at least.

'Don't leave,' he said.

Remus breathed. He kissed the top of Bill's head. 'Pull up the covers, then.'

Bill settled on his side, the dusty duvet tucked about his bare chest, and Remus's arm about him over that, Remus tucked close to his back. There were stars out there, somewhere, beyond the Muggle neons and city pollution. But it was the moon he could see out there, the moon watching them watch it back.


	2. One

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _starving hysterical naked_   
>  _dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn_   
>  _looking for an angry fix_
> 
>  
> 
> ~Howl, by Allen Ginsberg

_'Aren't you a sweet dish,' Greyback leered, circling. He crouched low on powerful thighs, ready at any moment to spring, but his unholy delight in savouring the kill held him back just a little bit longer. He bore no weapon but the yellowed nails arched like talons from his thick short fingers, the overlong teeth he bared at Bill in a fierce grin. No wand, and that was what undid it all. He had no wand, and Bill had never struck an unarmed man before._

_'Pretty boy,' Greyback crooned at him, and then suddenly he was a blur of movement, leaping across the dark tile as if he weren't at fifteen stone of solid muscle, his shaggy coat blurring like fur as he bounded the distance between them. He read Bill's attempt at a dodge and followed him, and they met with a smack of flesh that mowed Bill flat and threw him skidding across the marble. Greyback grabbed him by an ankle and hauled him in, dealt him a savage blow to the ear that rang him like a bell. He lay there, he just lay there senseless as Greyback climbed over him, disarmed him, threw his wand off into the dark and licked him, hot slimy tongue dragging a wet path from jaw to eyebrow. 'Pretty boy,' Greyback said, and held him down as he tore a chunk out of Bill's face._

He woke in a cold sweat.

It was light out the window. Just past dawn, that colourless grey of the urban morning. Bill stared at the gentle sway of the old lace curtains, trying to catch his breath, trying to unfreeze his limbs. He felt-- shattered. He hated it.

A sigh and shifting limbs beside him started his heart pounding all over again. He was half off the bed before sense returned and he had the capacity for being ashamed of himself, forgetting where he was, and what he'd done with whom he'd done it. Remus slept on, in the kind of oblivion of a man terminally deprived of enough-- enough sleep, enough safety, enough comfort to enjoy it.

Bill had. Enjoyed it. He remembered that with perfect clarity. Less so whether Remus had even-- Bill hadn't asked, hadn't cared. Remus had called him beautiful and let him take what he needed. That was one hell of a favour.

Bill slid the rest of the way off the bed, and sorted his clothes from the discarded mess on the floor. He dragged on his trousers bare-assed and buttoned them, scooped up pants, shirt, boots and bundled them under his arm. What kind of cretin crept out without so much as a thank you? He'd never been a fuck-and-duck, but he was hand on the latch before he could tell his feet to stop moving. Breathe, Weasley.

He Transfigured the dusty hairbrush on the vanity into a spray of wildflowers. He hadn't quite had a real flower in mind, more colour and shape, so they emerged into an indeterminate yellow and orange with long curling petals. They dimpled the cotton pillow sham slightly when he laid them in place beside Remus, just so, so they'd be the first thing he saw on waking.

The house was silent. Not silent, exactly; the stairs creaked, the walls cracked as they settled, but it wasn't like the Burrow, a place that lived as much as its inhabitants. And empty, so far as Bill could tell-- voices carried, he'd noticed that before here, and there was no feeling of life at all within Grimmauld Place. At the least that meant there was no-one to watch Bill trekking half-dressed up the stairs. He let himself into the third-landing loo, the one with the bathtub he'd personally scrubbed scum-free under Mum's critical eye, and locked himself in. It was a grim little watercloset, the slanted ceiling menacingly low over a dented chamber pot and more modern plumbing indiscreetly tacked to the wall as if the Muggle eyesore deserved to be as ugly as possible.

But it functioned, that was the only thing Bill cared about at the moment. He filled the tub with brackish water that never quite steamed, but it was at least warm enough to soak for a bit, and Bill stripped to ease himself in. Battle, shock, and sex in the space of a few hours had taken a toll, and Bill's muscles protested in a way he'd only rarely felt. That jaunt in the pharoah's temple, six straight days of believing he'd die at any moment when some ancient mummy's curse took his fool English head. Maybe once or twice after a long Quidditch match. He washed, gingerly, finding bruises and scrapes, wincing at a little tear that re-opened when he passed his fingers over the tender spot behind his bollocks. He'd been in such a rush he'd skimped on preparation and lubrication, lessons he ought to have learnt years ago. He lay back in the cramped little tub, wishing he could stretch out to his full length, finding himself curling instead into a tight ball submerged to the tip of his nose. There were doxies crawling along the rafters overhead. Mum wouldn't be pleased to see that. At least they were eating the spiders. He watched them til the water went cold, and a little longer after that, lost in the numb silence.

He stood dripping nude before the silvering old shaving mirror and pried off the bandage. Remus was right. He should've waited.

He could count individual teeth, on the bottom edge of it, a perfect arc of teeth just there below the line of his jaw. The damage was worse everywhere else. Greyback had torn him straight through, peeled him like the rind of an orange. Whatever potion or salve they'd put on him when he was unconscious last night had done for the little rips just under the cheekbone, and the secondary bite, not as bad as the first, along the tendon of his neck.

A pair of rusted scissors in the toiletry kit did the job. He cut enough of his hair that it fell naturally about his face, just past his collar, with shorter bits in the front curling a bit. It would hide the worst, if he kept his head down or turned away. He practised the angle in the mirror, from the left and then from the right. He looked normal from the right. He looked like before.

'Bill?'

He swiped a wet hand over the lifeless locks littering the sink, and tossed them into the chamber pot. 'Didn't mean to wake you,' he said, running the faucet and drowning the straggling hairs that remained down the drain.

'You didn't.' Remus stood in the doorway, dressed, mussed, still, up to and including a hickey on the underside of his jaw. Or maybe that was a bruise from yesterday's Battle. There was a red cut on his neck, a little enflamed. 'I thought that was rather the point... You didn't make it very far, if you were trying to run out.'

He had the little posey of Bill's flowers in his hand.

'I, um. I should apologise.' Bill grabbed a yellowed flannel from the rack and dried his hands. 'Last night, I--'

'It's not the least bit necessary.' Remus reached, and stroked the damp hair out of Bill's face, tucking it behind an ear. 'I can set another bandage for you.'

There was no taking the sting out of it, though Bill opened his mouth to try, as he twitched away and scratched at his hair. 'No, it's-- it's fine. I can do it.'

'Of course.' There was no taking the hurt away, Remus hoarding it into a careful step back to the shelter of the doorjamb. 'I'm not,' he began, and evidently thought better of it. 'I only wanted to tell you no-one's meant to be here, in Grimmauld Place, I mean, this weekend. If you wanted to stay. Quieter than the Burrow.'

Bill pulled a grimace. 'They mean well, it's only...'

'Bill, if you didn't want time to sort yourself, that would be odd. Wanting a little time alone is perfectly natural.' Remus smiled. It was impersonal; sympathetic, empathetic, even, but still somehow devoid of the intimacy of the simple act of sitting at Bill's bedside in case he woke afraid, alone, in desperate need of sexual healing. God, you are a fuck-up, Weasley, Bill thought, aching and immobilised.

'I asked Kreacher to leave you be unless you explicitly call for him. He'll put out meals and tea. And I've laid out a bottle of Firewhiskey in the study upstairs. Perfect place for releasing a little temper. Sirius likes to use the portraits in there for darts practise.'

'You're managing me,' Bill said. He swallowed drily. 'Thank you for trying.'

'Someone did something similar for me once.' Remus looked beyond Bill at the wet bath. 'I hated it. Hated needing it. But I did need it. And it's all right to need things, once in a while.' He made a small salute with the posey. 'I'll see you when they call us together again. You can owl, if you need anything before then. Questions I might be able to answer. Or clothes you might want to wear. Or not. I'm not advocating the clothes, actually.'

He didn't get the windfall of nerve until Remus had nodded into his awkward silence and made to leave. His hand caught in Remus's sleeve. In Remus's hair, thick and coarse and warm against his palm. Remus's lips were softer, surprised, maybe, but kind, too, and he let Bill lean on him and he held Bill loosely in the circle of one arm for as long as Bill wanted. Needed.

'Tonks is right,' Remus murmured against his ear, and chuckled suddenly. 'You're rather dashing.' He tucked Bill's hair off his face again, squeezed Bill's hand, and left.

 

 

**

 

 

No-one had told them.

Mum cried. Dad was all braced English repression, looking everywhere but Bill's face and doggedly repeating how lucky they'd all been this year, that nothing worse had become of them. The twins were oddly cowed, for once, and Ron and Ginny with their own new scars were too bold, and it was all wrong and ill-fitting and Bill hated it.

Harry was there. He sat on the tree swing in the back garden, still in the slight summer breeze, his wand laid across his lap. It didn't seem an accident that no-one bothered him out there, or that Harry didn't come in even when Mum called everyone together for tea.

'Let's set you down, love, you must be famished,' Mum fussed, her red eyes gleaming damp still as she pretended nothing at all was any different than any other holiday that found her grown children home. She installed Bill at the foot of the table, opposite his father, and filled his plate with thick slices of hot roast, warm yeast rolls, and a ploughman's worth of cheese and pickle. She smoothed a hand over his hair, but not to brush it out of his face, as she'd done since he was fifteen and first growing it long.

'Dumbledore's given you lot a bit of a holiday,' Dad said, 'an extended Easter break. Then it's back to exams for you.'

'What've they done about Umbridge?' Ron demanded. 'Now everyone knows You-Know-Who is back they've got to sack her for sure.'

'Hermione said something about Umbitch on the flight to the Ministry,' Ginny told him, smearing butter on her bread.

'Ginny!' Mum scolded. 'Language.'

'It's earnt,' Ginny answered, unapologetic and unmoved. 'That cow's a vile woman.'

'She was torturin' Harry,' Ron backed her up, around a mouthful of roast potato. 'She used a blood quill on him, and she would've used the Cruciatus, too, if he hadn't pretended to go along with her.'

'She can't have, that's illegal magic,' Dad denied.

'She did and that's the least of it.' Ginny dismissed their parents with nothing but a refusal to engage, and finished her conversation with Ron. 'Hermione said something about it. She and Harry led Umbitch into the Forest and left her to the Centaurs.'

'Centaurs?' Mum said weakly, sinking into a chair. 'How horrid.'

'I'd as soon feed her to the wolves,' Ron said. Then, 'Oomph,' as Ginny elbowed him sharpish in the ribs. 'What's that for!'

Everything came to a comically screeching halt. Everyone looked at Bill, and then everyone looked somewhere else, anywhere else.

'Didn't know she was _that_ bad,' said Fred, venturing into the gulf with a forced chuckle. 'All those stupid Educational Decrees were a nuisance and she was a right cow, but I didn't know she was hurting Harry.'

'Who doesn't hurt him,' Ginny muttered, and looked far too old for her short years.

'Dad? Mum?'

Heads turned to the Floo as it whooshed, announcing an arrival. It was Percy. He wore his cloak and the tatty old scarf Mum had patched too many times and he was all disarranged curls and red eyes as he shuffled in the ashes. No-one moved but Percy; no-one breathed, including Percy, and it hung trembling there, waiting to tip one way or the other, but no-one dared to push it.

But to a tee the Weasleys were Gryffindors, and Percy had his share. He'd made the first move, coming home. He made the next move, too, and it was brute honesty, absent all ego and dignity, and for a blazing moment Bill felt something about someone who wasn't himself.

'They began evacuating us when the fighting broke out,' Percy said. 'I was in the Atrium when... I saw everything. I came to say I'm sorry. I've been a fool.' He swallowed with evident difficulty, but he kept his chin up and he said his piece. 'I tried St Mungo's first. They told me you'd all come home already.'

The slightest trip in his voice over the word 'home' did Mum in. She choked on a cry, but Dad's hand on her arm kept her in her seat. 'We're all as you find us,' Dad said quietly. 'A bit worse for the wear, but... everyone's alive, and we'll mend.'

'I'm glad.' Wet escaped down Percy's cheek. He didn't wipe it away, his hands too occupied chafing each other raw. 'I'm... I'm really glad.'

'Don't stand in the fireplace all day,' Bill said. 'George, get another cup, will you? The kettle's still warm.'

Ginny's scowl protested. Ron made a little noise that might have been agreement, though which sib he meant it for Bill didn't enquire and didn't care to. He shoved back his chair and stood, and everyone watched in cringeing silence as he rounded the table to Percy. Percy's eyes overflowed again as Bill unhooked his cloak for him and hung it on a peg.

'Sit down,' Bill told him, and poured him a tea with the cup George brought from the hutch. Ginny passed the milk and sugar. Bill held Percy's chair for him, and put a hand on his shoulder, and gave the rest of his family a long stare that each avoided in turn.

'Perce is home where he belongs,' he said. 'So stop this silly feud, all of you. George, hand me another cup.' He emptied the kettle into it, splashed it with milk and a cube of sugar, and left them all behind him in fragile silence. His boots thudded the dirt as he crossed the yard, and tea sloshed as he put it in Harry's hand. Harry's head snapped up.

'If you want to avoid them,' Bill advised, 'the roof of Dad's workshed is a good spot. I'm claiming the old deerblind by the river.'

'Oh,' Harry said, wiping tea off his hand on his trousers. 'You, er, you want me to forget I heard that?'

'Ta very much.' 

 

 

** 

 

 

His old bedroom looked more like a museum to distant childhood than he'd recalled. The bunk he'd shared with Charlie felt impossibly small, creaking beneath his weight when he sat on the bottom. Most of his clothes, Quidditch gear, toys, and books had long been repurposed to the younger sibs, hand-me-downs that hadn't been new when Bill had received them from cousins before that, but there were touches still of the boy Bill had been in this room. Yellowed drawings still tacked to the walls, NEWTs results occupying pride of place above the battered old desk alongside the handwritten invitations Mum had mailed for his graduation picnic. A memory box filled with little trinkets-- a broken chesspiece, a Muggle fountain pen from Dad's collection that had fascinated him in distant days, a packet of old love letters tied together with a string and still smelling, more faintly every year, of Bitsy Weinberg's strawberry perfume.

The letters from Timothy Redfern had never made it to the box, nor the lock of hair from Andres Bianchi, who'd brought him chocolates from Ecuador and marvelled at his white skin and transferred home in tears after Professor Kettleburn discovered them in Greenhouse Three. The postcards Bill had owled home from Egypt had been dutifully collected and now lay where no-one would see them, stacked on a shelf, lame and only half true tales of exotic Cairo with its profuse Muggle sprawl and his first Arabic coffee and the wonders of the ruins of Alexandria. He'd barely written a word about his job, not wanting to worry Mum with the dangers of tomb-raiding and the thrills of losing himself in hookah bars and jazz at the Ritz Carlton and saunas with dark-eyed men who'd taught him to appreciate sensuality as well as sexuality. He'd done his crisis of self in Cairo, the freedom of complete disassociation from everything he'd been raised to know and everything that was possible if he never went home. He'd thought about it, really agonised over it, the possibility of just never going back to England.

But one day there'd been a letter from his old school master, requesting his company during a visit Dumbledore planned as part of his duties as Mugwump of the International Confederation of Wizards, and Bill'd taken him on a sedate little jaunt about town to a few tourist spots, picked a Western restaurant with imported wine, donned a wizarding robe for the first time in a year and been ready to smile politely. Dumbledore had been the polite one, nodding with congenial enthusiasm at the vast Nile and giving the pyramids the same cursory examination he paid their Muggle taxicab, and then he'd turned to Bill and said, 'If you ever want for an actual purpose, Mr Weasley, we could use you.'

Bill slept for two days. Spent the day after that in a groggy state something south of contentment, sitting in the garden with Harry and the kids, not really listening as they talked and not really minding when Harry and Ginny disappeared somewhere and came back an hour later mussed and guilty. 'Shouldn't you be stopping that?' George asked him indignantly, disgruntled with Bill's indifferent shrug. He looked up at some point mid-afternoon and found himself alone but for Percy, left behind as the others hunted up enough brooms for a game of pick-up Quidditch.

'Any thoughts on a new job?' Bill asked, not truly caring, but Percy cared, and he mustered himself for that.

'I don't know,' Percy said. His hands were always twisting on each other, knuckles standing white in relief. 'I only ever wanted to work in the Ministry. But Minister Fudge has resigned and whoever comes in new will bring in their own people and I...'

Bill watched the wind wave the branches of the ancient old oaks and waited for the whisper of it against his cheek. Even the air felt different on his scars. Electric. Alive. Malignant.

The full moon had passed unremarked. It was a fat pale globe, in the shadow of the sun, low on the horizon line.

'If you ever want for an actual purpose,' he said slowly, 'I can think of someone who will want you.'

The children went back to Hogwarts the day after that. Bill joined the adults seeing them off from the front garden, watching his mum's teary face with a strange absence of feeling. Harry and Ginny made awkward bookends to Ron and Luna Lovegood, who'd been walked over the hill by Xenophilius and who seemed livelier than Bill recalled of her, alert in a way that left her father anxious and unsettled and Bill's parents mournful and lost. All the kids looked that way, though, and the better for them, thought Bill, because nothing would catch them unawares again and they were ready for the fight, now, and if you were ready it wouldn't hurt so much next time.

He learnt not to look at himself in mirrors. He covered the mirror in the upstairs loo with a towel and no-one asked him about it.

The twins were in and out, up to something surprisingly non-explosive but still conducted with a great deal of whispering, sneaking, and ominous silence from their bedroom. Bill checked on them a few times out of some vague sense of duty, but didn't try to get past the door, and reported mumbled reassurances to their parents whenever required. They were all fallen back on old habits, in that way-- Bill babyminding and Mum fussing over Dad and Dad angsting powerlessly over the worries of the world. Then Bill would blink and see the grey in their hair or realise the twins were as tall as he was now or find Percy humbly doing the dishes by hand and wonder when they'd all changed so much.

Dumbledore's owl came on a Thursday. Bill hadn't known it was a Thursday. He also hadn't known the Weasley clan were in any condition to host an Order meeting, but Dumbledore's every whim must be obeyed, so Mum went charging over to Grimmauld Place with Percy in tow in a panicky cleaning mode and Dad, snakebitten and still wobbly on his feet, went lurching off to the Ministry to put an ear to the ground and pick up any useful gossip that could be got out of the chaos there. Bill only found out about it when he wandered down from a nightmare-plagued sleep and found the Burrow empty, Dumbledore's letter abandoned on the kitchen counter.

He threw it into the fire and watched long enough to see it disintegrate, then went upstairs to finish his nap. 

 

**

 

 

'We have a great deal of news to get through,' Dumbledore opened the meeting. 'First: All regular staff have returned to Hogwarts. Including myself.'

This was met with a rousing cheer. Bill clapped his hands together once, mostly to avoid anyone noticing he wasn't sharing the celebratory mood. He'd argued against abandoning post, in the school-- the children were too vulnerable. Had been proved too vulnerable, but no-one bothered Albus Dumbledore with minor details like blood quills, torture curses, inquisition squads and truth serum.

'I understand Hagrid had a devil of a time retrieving his flock of thestrals from the roof of the office block next door to the Ministry,' Dumbledore went on, the old twinkle in his eye in full glitter, 'but all are safely returned to the school, as are the children who bravely rode them there. Now, as to the battle itself: Lord Voldemort was not successful in his goal. He failed to retrieve the prophecy.'

A few explosive sighs of relief, at that. They'd been all bloody year guarding the Department of Mysteries, Bill supposed it was good to know it hadn't been a complete waste. He wasn't sure he could claim it was worth the cost, though. All that for a prophecy-- lives had been spent on that, fifteen years' worth of lives, now, back to the Potters and the Longbottoms and the Death Eaters Voldemort had thrown at the braced iron wall that was the Order of the Phoenix. Casualties to both sides chasing after whatever vague mutterings passed as fate.

'Now,' Dumbledore said, turning solemn as he stood facing them all, 'now we must re-set the board, and begin our next play.'

There were new assignments. Some predictable-- Tonks and Kingsley were to cosy up to the new Chief Auror, whoever that would be when the snap election dust settled. Sturgis Podmore would be their man in the new administration, a career bureaucrat who would be counted on to have an ear pressed to all the right doors when he wasn't being Imperiused to let the enemy through the wrong doors. Some were so new the shine was still on them; Sirius Black's celebrity star was rising and Dumbledore wanted him in public, in the newspapers and on the radio telling the whole wizarding world who to fear and how to spot them coming. 'Gladly,' Sirius drawled in three smug syllables. 'I spent a decade staring through the bars at the whole bloody lot of Death Eaters. I can describe them down to their ingrown toenails.'

'Very useful information, that,' Remus murmured, but there was something shadowed and unhappy in his face, or bitter, maybe, and it was directed at Dumbledore, and, most interesting of all, Dumbledore met that look with humility and apology.

'Better, perhaps, to have had you in the public eye all along,' Dumbledore admitted then, 'but we can only live in the moment we have now, and the moment has arrived. Let us leverage our advantages as best we can. Remus, my boy.'

'You want me back with them,' Remus said simply, though there was nothing simple in that mystery, and in the way uneasy looks chased awkward grimaces in a skip about the kitchen, leaping over the younger generation of Phoenix members. Dad looked grim, Bill saw. Sirius grimmer.

'Do we really think we have a chance at them?' Sirius said, and put his hand on Remus's knee, fingers curling intimately, protectively.

'If we have, we must seize it. Remus? Are you willing?'

'Things are worse for our kind than they were last time,' Remus said, and now the grimace reached every face, as the mystery resolved. 'And I'm known, now. It wasn't that long ago my sacking was front page news.'

'I would not send you where you can have no effect. I leave it to your judgment.'

That was some extraordinary tip-toeing from a man who usually had only to ask-- who usually had only to pretend to frame it as a question. But Remus considered, and didn't answer right away, and in the end gave only a thoughtful nod, not a real agreement. Dumbledore nodded back, and moved on.

'Mr Weasley, Mr Weasley, and Mr and Mr Weasley,' he said, turning toward the contingent of brothers aligned on the left side of the table, a long ginger queue on which their parents looked with pride. Percy and the twins had sworn the oath first thing, Dumbledore inducting them and Dad serving as their binder, and Bill had stood looking on wondering what exactly it was he felt, watching. The twins were sopping it up like sponges, all the glamour and the secrecy and scheming. Percy sat in his usual rigid posture, but his eyes had taken on an almost feverish glaze. Zealot in the making, all the more fervent because he'd only so recently seen the light.

'Whatever I can do,' Percy answered immediately, stridently, almost begging.

'We have great need of you,' Dumbledore replied. 'If you can bear it, my boy, we need you precisely where you are already stationed. With the Minister of Magic.'

'I'm only an assistant to the Undersecretary,' Percy said, startled and possibly shamed to have risen no further at the ancient age of nineteen. 'And I don't know they'll keep me on, whoever's elected.'

'Do whatever you must to keep that job,' Kingsley told him. 'Lie and curse your family and Dumbledore and Harry Potter if you have to. Swear oaths if they require that. Ingratiate yourself. Stay late and take on every chore and be the most loyal person in that office, so that when they go looking for someone to share secrets, they choose you.'

'I can do that,' Percy said eagerly. 'I swear I'll do everything I can.'

'He's too young,' said Severus Snape, and heads turned to the shadowy corner behind the stove where Snape lurked.

'I can do it!'

'We need more eyes and ears in the Ministry,' Dad answered, and Percy nodded so many times his body rocked with it. 'We've never had anyone placed so close to the Minister's office. Friend or foe, it would be invaluable to our cause.'

'He's too young,' Snape said again, but the usual sneer was absent from a face that sagged at the eyes and mouth, weariness and something more defeated than weariness. 'They're all too young.'

'So were we,' Sirius snapped back. 'If the lad wants to fight, I say give 'im a weapon. You're up for it, Percy, aren't you? Good man. Good soldier.'

'Your uncles would be proud of you boys,' Mum said, reaching across Bill to take Percy's hand. 'This was their war, too. God willing, we'll see it to an early end.'

'God willing,' Dumbledore echoed, and Bill wondered if he was the only one to think it rang a little hollow.  
 

 

**

 

 

Bill invented an errand in the library that took him out of range of his parents. They were done in trying to argue Fred and George down from a few toweringly complex plots the twins had immediately begun to sketch for their assignment of building a network in Diagon Alley. He gave himself a goodly twenty minutes after their voices drifted up the corridor and out the front door, and only braved a poke about the floor when he was sure he was the lone Weasley still in Grimmauld Place.

'Oh,' said Remus, pausing in the door. 'Sorry, I can...'

'Come in.' Bill stopped pretending to read and let a book sag closed between his knees. He hadn't even read the cover, and was a bit embarrassed to find himself holding _Secrets of the Sabbat: The Rites of Wild Witches._ He dropped it to the ground where the nude dancing ladies in the illustration couldn't pout up at him.

'It's healing well. That's a good sign.'

Bill touched the scabby ever-present ache on his cheek. 'Yeah.' He cleared his throat. 'You, er, you never owled.'

'I didn't think you'd want me to. You didn't owl me.'

He was wincing at himself as soon as the words left his mouth. 'Yeah. I know. I.' He pushed upright from his seat on the lower rungs of the stepladder, didn't know what to do with himself once he was standing, and shoved his hands into his pockets. 'You really going back to the werewolves, then?'

Remus turned his head away. In profile the bags under his eyes weren't so prominent, only contributed, like the slight upturn of his nose, the deep vee of his upper lip, the trace of silvery scars to the look of a man carved up and whittled down by life. He wasn't handsome, not conventionally, and maybe once Bill would've passed him over for someone younger or fitter with cheekbones for days like Sirius Black or muscles like Kingsley Shacklebolt, but too much had changed in the last week. Bill looked at him now and saw someone who'd survived. Someone who'd seen nightmares made real. Someone who'd got used to being the nightmare.

'Dumbledore's right, we won't have a chance at many of Voldemort's allies,' he was saying. Bill wrenched himself into the present and nodded as if he had any idea what he was agreeing to. 'The goblins will cling to neutrality as long as their economic advantages aren't threatened. The giants and the dragons want more territory, and eliminating the Muggles is the only way they'll get it. There's no British vampire covens anymore, not of any significant size, and we can't court elf magic unless their owners freed them in great enough numbers to make any kind of dent.'

'Uh,' Bill said. Remus's eyes, pale green, flicked to him. 'Someone like Greyback, though, he won't... he wouldn't stop unless we stopped him.'

'It'll be harder than last time. There's more of us, now. The Wolfsbane's meant that more of us live through it. And the Wolfsbane's meant more of us live to hate those who won't accept us back. They won't be leaping to fight a wizard's war, not when there's nothing for them in it.'

'What can You-Know-Who offer them? He won't raise them up as equals.'

'The thought would never cross his mind,' Remus said, with a bitter little smile. 'To him every werewolf is a monster who lives only to kill. He'll offer werewolves the same thing he'll offer the giants, the dragons, the liches, the monsters. Prey.'

'Enough for Greyback.'

'We're not all Greyback.'

'I know,' Bill said. 'That's why you'll win. I want to go with you.'

A blink was all the reaction necessary to that. Remus opened his mouth, paused, and reconsidered. He said, slow and quiet, 'Even if we found him, you know, there'd be no chance at revenge.'

'You must have had the chance to kill him. You didn't. I can do that, if I have to.'

'It's not just holding yourself back. It's understanding him. We won't win a challenge. We have to win him over, instead.'

'He's a monster. He's evil. You'll find a way to stop him.' Bill wet his lips. 'I could help.'

Something changed in Remus's face. An acknowledgment of a different kind, maybe. 'All right,' he agreed.

'I'm going with you.'

'All right.'

'All right.' Bill inhaled, and on the exhale knew what the lurch in his gut was. A decision in the making. 'I'm going with you,' he said, and crossed the distance between them in two strides.

They bumped into a shelf of books and knocked elbows against a vase of dried flowers. It wobbled on its stand, rolled onto the carpet with a little thump that went ignored as they scraped at each other with teeth and tongue. Bill fumbled with buttons, left wet kisses in his wake as he bared Remus's chest, buried his nose in the thick hair over a bony sternum and mouthed at a lean belly. He was on his knees within seconds and dragged Remus's jeans down by the belt loops.

'Bill,' Remus gasped, 'you don't have to--'

Try and stop me, Bill would've said, but his mouth was otherwise occupied.

'Thought I saw them coming in here,' said a voice on the other side of the door, irony-free but bringing a hefty dose of horror. Bill wrenched from Remus as the latch depressed and the door began to swing open. He scrambled for purchase on the carpet, skidding for the corner, but the door bumped his legs as a crowd came pouring in.

Not a crowd-- two people, both of them agape. Sirius Black and Bill's dad. Remus had gone the expedient route and turned his back for a quick zip-up, but there was no explaining shirtlessness and red lips, not to mention the obvious erections. Bill yanked his shirt untucked and fluffed it over his crotch, hoping vainly all the blood rushing to his face would fix that quicker than not.

Dad had his own turn at the signature Weasley shade of tomato cheeks, spluttering and dithering to leave and then changing his mind and slamming the door shut and locking it. 'I should maybe be on the other side of that,' Sirius said delicately, but Dad was busy with the first of several silencing and privacy charms, so Sirius cleared his throat and wandered off to the far side of the library, pretending to be absorbed in examining the contents of an old curio case.

'I,' squeaked Dad, and 'You,' and a few other meaningless syllables. Bill lurched to his feet, scrubbing his hand over his mouth hurriedly.

'Arthur,' Remus said, in that consciously inoffencive tone he took whenever he had to publicly disagree with anyone. 'It's probably best for all of us if we walk away before tempers take over.'

'Tempers,' Dad repeated dumbly. 'You think I'm going to lose my temper over this? You're damned right I'll lose my temper. He's half your age!'

'We're barely ten years apart,' Bill objected, which only drew his dad's attention to him, and the rare sight of Arthur Weasley in a towering rage. Bill took a step back out of sheer instinct, and felt Remus's hand on his shoulder.

'I think you had better leave, Lupin,' Dad said.

'It's my house,' Sirius put in from behind them, unwisely, but Dad only stiffened what little more he could and corrected himself.

'I think you had better leave my son alone.'

'It's not your place to say that.' Bill took Remus's hand off his shoulder and held it, instead. 'Anyway, if he goes, I go. I'm going with him.'

'You're coming home this instant, young man, not anywhere near this-- man--'

'Werewolf,' Bill said.

Dad slashed a hand through the air, refusing for once to be flustered. 'I didn't say that, that's not the least reason I'm upset walking in on this!'

'Bill,' Remus murmured, drawing away, or would have, if Bill had let him get any distance. 'Bill, he's not wrong.'

'I don't need anyone's permission or opinion,' Bill retorted. The one Weasley trait he hadn't inherited was the Weasley temper, and he wasn't angry now-- cold, instead, cold to the core of himself, and done with arguing. 'I'm not your son. Whoever Bill Weasley was, I left him on the floor of the Department of Mysteries. Look at me, Dad. I'm not the same anymore, and Remus is the only one who knows what that feels like.'

'I know you're upset, Bill, we all are. But you're only lashing out after a scare, and what you're feeling now will fade. Of course we all know what that feels like, we've all taken a close shave before, every one of us.'

'Look at my fucking face when you say that,' Bill said.

Dad tried. That was the worst part of it, really. That it took so damn much effort.

'You're putting Percy and the twins in danger. You're not going to pop me off back to Gringotts and pretend I'm doing something useful out of the way where I can't get hurt any more. I should be with Remus, with Greyback and the werewolves. I've got a badge of honour to get me through their bloody front door. I can do something real.'

'You're just upset,' Dad repeated, as if saying it enough was reason not to be. But Bill wasn't, not really. If anything, he felt clear. Clearer than in days. Clearer, maybe, than he'd been even before Greyback had marked him and destroyed a lifetime's trajectory of normal.

And that was it, really. That was it and it struck him like a bag of stones to the head. He wasn't upset. He was free. Half a face gone and the mark of a werewolf and the weight of twenty six years of expectations had up and vanished. He would never be normal again. He would never have to try to be again.

'And that's final,' Bill said, and, for the first time in his life, it was.


	3. Two

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,_
> 
> _who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz_

The pack of Muggle ciggies was nearly empty when Bill took it to hand. Three, four, five sticks remaining inside, he counted. Two less, when he shook them out and propped them between his teeth. The snick of the lighter flaming to life was accompanied by a moment's warmth on his fingertips, followed by the peculiar chemical flush of the first inhale.

Remus took the left cigarette from Bill's mouth and brought it to his own. 'You've been digging through my baggage,' he observed, smoke dribbling from his nostrils. He didn't pose with the fag, no hand curled just so to minimise the ash, no careless tilt of the head to draw artful attention to his lips. He pinched the cigarette with thumb and forefinger and gave it a tap with the middle, and sucked on it hard enough to burn out half an inch in one breath.

'D'you mind?' Bill asked. 'It wasn't to pry.'

'Then what was it for?'

The Muggle pub had that old food rotting over centuries smell to it. And stale vomit only half-heartedly cleaned and cheap beer less heartedly brewed. Bill tried to look on it as a kind of anthropological adventure-- the explorer in a strange land observing the habits of the natives-- he was mostly just concerned that the barstool he occupied had a sticky something on the vinyl seat and the basket of curry chips they'd been served probably hadn't been fresh in a week.

Yet they'd cooled their heels in this pub for near a week, now. They'd walked to get here, each carrying a bag on their shoulder, like Muggle sailors in a picture, their coats unbuttoned in the summer sun and red collecting on all that bare skin from sun exposure. There was mud caked on their boots and they were each a bit ripe, with sleeping in the cheap Muggle hostel up the road with its limited bathing facilities. Bill wore his hair back out of necessity, having gone several days without a proper wash, but he kept to the corner and Remus let him have the seat the put his unblemished cheek to the rest of the patrons. What Remus did not let him have was virtually everything else. Information. A say in their agenda. Eye contact.

Bill exhaled a mouthful of acrid smoke. 'S'pose I was hoping for a rise out of you. Fracture the marble facade.'

Remus looked. Green eyes, pale in the low pub light with just a ring of dark about the irises, washed out like the rest of him to just the outline and the smudge inside it. 'What am I not doing enough of to please you?' he said in return, and dragged another inch of the fag on the inhale.

Bill laughed. He couldn't help it. 'Okay.' He shoved the pack into his pocket, pushing until the box corner jabbed him a bit in the thigh. 'Can I at least ask questions?'

'I haven't told you you couldn't.'

True, if they were speaking of the ten or fifteen words they'd exchanged in the course of a week. That was different from soliciting questions, and Bill had been under the strong impression they weren't welcome. But he was bored out of his mind, and a little pugnacious after his second beer of the evening, and fuck it, anyway. He was no use to anyone if he didn't know what to do and what not to do.

He said, 'Our kind. Is it true we can recognise each other? Find each other?'

'My kind,' Remus said, and blew a cloud of smoke into the lip of his mug as he drained his bitter. 'Yes. Sort of. No secret codes, none of that nonsense, but we find each other when we need to.'

'When you need to?'

'We don't most of us go looking for others. Only thing harder than making it as an outcast in our world is making it in a crowd.'

'That's a cynical view.'

'Call it repeatedly reinforced realism.'

'So what's it like in the packs, then? Why even have packs, if that's the way of the world?'

'The packs have given up fitting in with either Muggles or Wizardkind. They're self-sustaining, if that's not too much of an exaggeration, and they're outside all other communities.' Remus paused long enough to waggle his empty glass at the bartender. 'They take in the occasional newcomer, but they don't hang a welcome shingle. People who've lived out in "civilisation" don't transition well.'

Bill waited. And waited. 'And?'

'And what?' Remus laid a five pound note on the counter and took his change in a few carelessly tossed coins alongside his fresh beer. 'Every would-be dictator approaches them, but they'll never join a side. They don't give a fuck for sides. None of those sides would give them what they want, which is to be left alone and guaranteed their hunting grounds.'

'Hunting grounds?'

'Food,' Remus said. 'Not people.' He drank.

'Did I offend you?'

'What? No.'

'You're acting like I offended you.'

Remus put his chin to his chest. Turned the beer in place on the bar, around, around, within the ring of condensation on the old oak surface. 'I like you,' he said, words dragged out on a hook, and Bill left wondering what, exactly, he was reeling in.

'That's good,' Bill returned cautiously. 'I like you too.'

'But you don't. Not really.'

'I--' That brought him up short. He attended his own cigarette, tapping ash into the nearby plastic tray. 'I do. I'd like to like you more. Find a dark spot or, I don't know, I-- we could, like-- like, do you like me enough for me to suck you off, or, I don't know, I could be into some weird shit, we could pop round to the corner sex shop and discuss some options...'

'I like you,' Remus said again, and ground out the butt on the edge of their plate, tipping it to land in a congealed sludge of curry.

'Wow.'

'Bill.'

'Damning thing, to be liked. I never knew.'

'Bill,' Remus said.

'Look, if you regret-- if you don't want to do it again--' He'd never been turned down before. It was a little absurd. More than a little absurd, because all signs pointed to more yes than no, and he didn't think he was reading it wrong. He shifted on his stool, to press his thigh against Remus's. Remus didn't move, to protest or to encourage, but he breathed in, a fraction deeper than normal, and he held it. He held it til Bill reached down between them, to cup his palm to Remus's knee, stroking with his thumb. Remus didn't breathe at all, then.

'I have more regrets than I can carry,' Remus said, and took Bill's half-finished fag to finish it, too. He smashed the butt into the ashes in the dish. 'I'm waiting for you to wake up and. You know. You're young, you're... Your dad was right. About pretty much all of it.'

Bill opened his mouth, and paused. 'My dad doesn't know what the hell he's talking about.'

'Maybe not personally, but he got it pretty close to correct.'

'I thought you understood,' Bill said, protested, whinged. He winced at himself.

Remus cocked a small smile at him. It crinkled the lines at his eyes. 'I know it's not a hissy fit. And I know there's no way out of it but further in. And I know that one day soon enough you'll wake up and you won't need anyone there to catch you, because you won't be falling anymore.' He forestalled a word from Bill by bringing Bill's hand to his lips, and kissing his knuckles. 'Who you think caught me, when I fell?'

'Not Dumbledore.'

'No, not Dumbledore.'

'That's a story there.' But it wasn't the time for that story, and he wanted to know the one they were skirting the edge of now, when Remus was actually stringing two words together for once. 'It's someone still in your life, someone I know, or you'd have just said, I reckon. And not someone obvious... not Sirius Black, though everyone thinks that, you know. The two of you holed up together in Thailand, out from under judgy English eyes. Although I've thought there might be a sliver of truth in it; he touches you.'

'More truth than a sliver.'

He heard the noise more than the actual words. A jeer, and a laugh, that peculiar edge to a laugh that was meanness and intent. Meant to be heard. Remus let him go, turned back to his beer. Bill turned to seek the source of it. Eyes eluded his, gazes suddenly studiously interested in plates and booze. He confronted the one he thought must have laughed, a farmer-looking fellow with a coarse beard and thick-set shoulders. Bill faced him fully, levelled his stare.

'Want some air,' Remus said, and stood. 'Come on.'

'Thing's'll change someday,' Bill muttered, but he stooped for his bag and slung it over his shoulder. Remus did the same, and led the way out the back, headed for the exit beyond the loo. A slur chased them out. Bill scowled.

It was a cool clear night. Stars were out, spotty, feeble lights in the sky that seemed farther away than in the countryside of Ottery St Catchpole. The smell of salt and tar and fish swallowed them up as they walked toward the docks, wet on the stones muffling the crack of their heels. Remus walked as if he knew where he was going-- he always did-- though to Bill it was a mystery, all of it, from the way Remus waited on him patiently one moment and nearly left him behind the next, wondering whether it was a right or a left or where the hell-- then suddenly in the shelter of a bobbing rusted scow and the smack of waves on the wooden pilings Remus stood waiting for him. Bill closed the distance, took the hand that reached for him, let it rise to his cheek and stroke the edges of his wounds.

'You like me,' Bill said.

Remus blew out a little breath. 'I like you. Of course I like you. You're young and handsome and brave and gifted. I like your hair. I like your eyes. I like--'

'You like that I'm like you.'

'You're not,' Remus denied, but this close Bill saw it, the regret and the remorse for regretting it and even more than that, the loneliness that spawned all the rest of that awful well of feeling. And it was the feeling that scared him, scared Remus Lupin, feeling all that very much for someone who wasn't the same as him and would therefore being going away, some day soon, as he'd said.

Bill had never been much good at the future. Not the magic kind and not the normal sort either. Too much of his life had been set out for him-- expectations spoken and silent, the weight of being the eldest son even of parents who'd been content for him to merely be his best, whatever that looked like. All his life he'd been struggling to read the tea leaves, to live up to the ghosts of his martyred uncles and his mum's ambitions for him and his dad's gentle but insistent pressure to somehow miraculously just know what it was he wanted out of life and fall right into the one thing perfectly suited for him-- the career, the wife, the children. Remus was none of those things. Remus had nothing to offer, nothing to give, and Bill wanted it with all his being.

The kiss started slow. That was something new, to be savoured. Remus gentled him at every turn, tugged away Bill's searching fingers from his shirt hem, from his belt loops, from the curves of his ass. When Bill made a noise of frustration, Remus swallowed it up, quietened him. He slid the tie from Bill's hair and attended the line of Bill's jaw, the jut of his adam's apple, licked at the hollow of his throat. 'Like this,' Remus whispered against his skin. 'I want to see this.'

Bill arched his neck obediently. 'Wanna bed,' he sighed, let himself be chased away from the jut of Remus's hips so long as Remus pressed palms with him, twining their fingers. He lifted his arms and Remus pressed him back against the cold rocking metal of the boat, pressed his hands up beside his head and held him there. 'Wanna bed,' Bill said again urgently.

'You should learn to appreciate the little things.'

'Not so little, from what I remember.'

A chuckle whuffed the hair by his ear. 'You really just said that?' Remus eased away. 'You're a wet dream, aren't you? This is pornography, not reality.'

'I like a little porn sometimes, too.'

'What are you, nineteen? Seventeen?'

'Twenty-six.' Bill tested the strength of the hands encasing his wrists. 'You're not ancient.'

'Tell me that again in the morning.'

'Oi. Oi, mate. You smell that, eh?'

'Ohhhh fuck off,' Bill moaned. 'Just hold still, maybe they won't see us.'

'Oi! You on the dock. I know you kin smell it.'

'Hold still,' Remus repeated, in a strange and tense tone. He released Bill's hands and turned, but gave him no space, standing so close his shoulder brushed Bill's.

Two men. No, three-- one stayed on shore, slouched against the short brick gate with a fine point of orange flame, a cigarette, the only light to identify him. The other two were approaching at a slow gait that caged them in, he and Remus, locked against the boat at the far end of the dock with no-where to run but the cold brackish water to either side of the pier. Bill caught the whiff of danger, too late, and looked to their hands. Neither man striding toward them held a wand, at least not openly. One had his hands in the pockets of his short coat, which might mean a Muggle weapon-- Bill knew enough about guns to know they could be concealed like that-- but the other looked unarmed, his layers of flannel shirts open over a grungy vest that showed off muscles but nothing that might serve in a distance attack.

Assuming there would be any distance between them. Remus said nothing, just stood there, and the men came on, closing the last few metres. Close enough to pick out their features even in the fading moonlight. Young, maybe Bill's age, the closest one, the other something between forty and sixty, with small eyes and a grin that did unhappy things to Bill's gut.

'That's the stuff,' the young one said, spreading his empty hands wide, tilting his head to the whiff of breeze blowing off the water. 'Ahhh. Yeah. Know that anywhere. Never gets old, does it?'

'What is he talking about?' Bill whispered.

'Werewolf,' Remus said tightly.

The word went through him with a jolt. Werewolf. They'd been found.

'Look at 'im, Ned,' said the young one over his shoulder, though his eyes never left them. 'Good match for the description.'

Ned snorted casually. 'Good 'nuff.'

'Think he's the alpha? Awfully protective.' The young one feinted at them, laughing uproariously when Bill flinched back and palmed his wand. Remus didn't-- Remus stood his ground with a clenched jaw and a hard gaze. 'Lupin,' the young one called him, and Remus raised his head just a little bit, something cold and stony going over his face, his shoulders, his spine.

'There's no such thing as alphas and betas,' Remus told them. 'Just men impatient for the point. What do you want with us?'

'Wiv you. You're to come wiv us.'

'Where, exactly?'

'You don't need to know that just yet. Now you goin' to come nice, or you goin' to come nasty?'

'Remus?' Bill asked, summoning a hex to mind and picking his target of the two, aiming for the older man. Werewolf. Remus would take the young one, he was sure, and provide Bill the cover of his body to deal with the other threat. And then whoever was still standing would take out the one up by the gate, and anyone who might be waiting in the dark beyond--

But Remus shook his head. 'Not without a name.'

That wasn't directed at Bill. The young one considered them, if he was clever enough for deeper thoughts, or maybe he was just reviewing his orders and probing their elasticity.

'You'll find out when you get where we're goin',' he decided.

'Not good enough,' Remus returned. 'Your master's name, or my friend and I go back to our business and you to yours.'

'You are my business, Lupin.'

'Then your master's name is part of doing business.'

'You'll hear it when you meet 'im. No more questions.'

'Never deal with underlings,' Remus muttered, not very quietly, and it carried. The young one didn't like that. 'Doubt he's ever even met his master. You, then?' he added, pitching that louder still, not to the young one, not to Ned, but to the one who lingered at the gate, invisible but for the glow of his smoke. 'Or am I to believe your master trusts no-one and hires werewolves as street toughs and errand boys, but nothing more?'

'Remus, if we're going to run for it--'

'We're not,' Remus replied calmly, and Bill nodded, accepting it unhappily. It was what they'd come to do. It was too late now it was happening to object, even if Bill suspected it was going to be an uncomfortable introduction.

'They know you,' he said.

Remus nodded. 'They know me.'

'Is that good or bad?'

'Honestly,' Remus said, 'it's hard to tell. Cooperate. Don't give them an excuse to hurt you.'

The one at the gate had made some gesture or given some sign. Ned tossed the young one a bundle of cloth. The young one held them up, grinning. Sackcloth bags. The young one gave them a second toss, and Remus snagged them out of the air.

'Quit playing with the lads, Dex,' said the one at the gate, with a cloud of smoke and a thick accent to match the film noir revelation. 'We've a van. Come quietly. You can talk to our leader with or without kneecaps.'

That was clear enough. Remus reached back. His hand squeezed Bill's. Sweaty and a little damp, the only sign of nerves in an otherwise stoic demeanor. It was all in the touch, not even a hint in the eyes, til they connected with Bill's and fractured. But he said nothing, and did nothing but squeeze Bill's hand before he lifted one of the bags and drew it down over Bill's head, adjusting it gently to fall loose about his shoulders. Bill closed his eyes-- there was nothing to see inside the sack-- and made himself breathe evenly as possible as Remus's touch vanished. His wand was taken from his hand, and he convulsively fisted his fingers, warning himself to-- but the sudden yank to his elbow had him jumping; he was roughly hauled about, stumbling on the uneven boards of the dock and trying not to think about how easy it would be for the werewolves to pitch him overboard and Remus would never even know he was gone--

His thighs met a hard metal edge and he folded over it, shoved from behind til he figured out he was meant to climb. He fumbled it, scrambling for a handhold or a sense of space, knocked along by the werewolf behind him til he lost his balance. He tumbled nose-first into a wall, acquiring a bruising impact to the ridge of his eye before he slid into something softer. Remus. An arm came about him, protective, but he no sooner thought he might be safe enough than their hands were being seized and wrapped with something tight and binding. In front, at least, it wasn't as uncomfortable as it could have been, but all the same he was grateful for the knee he could feel pressed into his.

So. This was it, then. No going back now. He was in it.

 

 

**

 

 

The ride went on forever. Long enough that the frisson of fear faded and Bill discovered it was entirely possible to be bored of your own kidnapping. He was tired of breathing his own breath inside the airless sack, tired of his lurching stomach carsick from the rocking Muggle vehicle. Tired of the muffled voices of their captors, who spoke in a rough slang and seemed to laugh an awful lot for no reason Bill could figure. There was nothing particularly hilarious in their situation he could see.

But just when his chin hit his chest, the van screeched to a stop. Someone smacked at the side of his head to wake him, and then he was being hauled out much the way he'd been shoved in. He stumbled to pavement, held up by a hand under his armpit only so he could be subject to more casual abuse. He was frog-marched in an unknown direction, and when he called out for Remus his arm was cruelly wrenched in its socket. He shut up.

Then all suddenly there was light. They had ripped the sack from his head. Bill blinked, dazed, to find himself standing in an overgrown cobbled courtyard before what had once been a handsome mansion of tall grey stone. It was only barely better than derelict now. Half the windows sported broken glass, indifferently papered over. The stone was pockmarked with breakage, lichen, and what looked like scorch marks-- a battle site? From when? But even as he thought Bill realised the backdrop was not the most important detail. The men and women who came filtering through the cockeyed front doors and from the sagging orangery at the left were the real sight.

There was nothing especially linking them as a group. Some were old, some young, some black or Asian, some white. Some wore battered leather jackets or worn denim or even, one or two, a wizard's robe, and Bill looked to them especially for some sign of the familiar, a Ministry badge or a face he'd seen at Hogwarts, but he found them alien from himself and from each other except in one respect. They were here, in a den of werewolves.

Werewolves. Bill went keen. His gut went cold. Greyback was here.

Everything else fell away in that moment of recognition. Bill could have been back in the Department of Mysteries, could have been flat on his back on smooth marble tile with his ears ringing with his own scream and bloody teeth leering down at him. Greyback was here. Greyback was here, was slouching on a step outside the mansion, paring his fingernails with a knife and paying no particular attention to the gathering crowd or the sight they'd come to see. New arrivals.

'On your knees,' Dex ordered him. Bill obeyed the downward push that put him on the ground, only barely cognisant of it. Greyback was all he could see. Greyback and those teeth.

'Recruits?'

Greyback sniffed the air, spat at the ground. Ignoring everything beneath his notice. Look at me, you fat old fuck, Bill wanted to howl at him. In the daylight you're nothing. Belly hanging over his belt. Long hair straggling at his shoulders not disguising the growing bald spot on the top. Arthritic hands, like Great-Uncle Bilius, permanently disfigured by age and disease. You're just a man. You're just a man and men can die.

'Picked 'em up outside Worthing,' answered Ned, reaching to stop Remus's trajectory, and missing. Remus shoved at Dex and got Bill onto his feet, or nearly, before Dex growled and slapped him away.

'Why you bring 'em both?' Greyback wondered.

'Found 'em together.'

'Dead weight, int he, the ginger? Get rid of him.'

'Touch him and I will kill you,' Remus told Dex, and planted himself over Bill, boots spread, knees locked, face cold and dangerous. That caught Bill's attention away from Greyback. He'd never seen that look in Remus's eyes before. Dead weight-- that registered, suddenly. Dead weight. He wasn't a werewolf. They knew how to find each other, how to identify each other, and they'd identified Remus, not him. Fuck.

'You don't give orders to me,' Dex sneered. 'Queer banger, ain't you? Bad enough you slobberin' all over each other in an alley, you want to keep your pet human on beck and call--'

'Touch him and I will kill you.'

'Enough talking,' said Greyback.

It happened in a rush and a crawl at once. Bill felt a hand in his hair, wrenching his head back. Saw the flash of morning sunlight on a knife, too sharp or too dull at once, slicing toward his exposed throat. Saw Remus move, felt the blow that knocked him out of the way, sprawled him to the stones. Stones. Saw the stone in Remus's hand, as he tripped Dex to the cobbles and straddled him and crushed his skull with a rock stabbed down into his face. Blood spattered Bill's cheek, hot, cold, startling. Inhuman. Werewolf blood.

Fuck, Bill thought numbly. Fuck.

No-one stopped it. No-one moved to defend Dex, who lay moaning and twitching. Remus let the bloody rock fall with a careless little toss. He stood, stepped over the man he'd just maimed, killed, maybe, Dex wasn't making a sound now, just that twitch of the fingers, a little seizure of nerves, mouth hanging open and stopped up and silent-- Remus stepped over him as if he were nothing but a few sticks of firewood, took Bill by the arm, supported him upright. All bound still at the wrists with a bit of old rope.

Bill was shaking. It shuddered through him. It stopped. He went on breathing, as you did, when someone was killed in front of you and you weren't. When you lived and someone else who'd threatened you didn't. Remus was warm against him, a block of warmth except in his face, which was cold as the grave.

'You claim this human, then?'

New voice. New man, standing before them. The Count of Monte Cristo, he looked, like the front cover of the dog-eared book in Remus's bag. The man-- the werewolf-- descending on heeled satin court shoes wore a frock coat and a jacquard cape and dripped in silk ribbon and lace. An emerald ear-drop hung at his elegantly bearded jaw, the better to match the ruby-like red of his smile and bright onyx eyes. He crossed the cobbles heedless of the dirt and scraggly grass that threatened his fine illusion, and that more than anything made him seem a creature spun of gold, not flesh. A man that privileged carried it with him, turning even the dust to decoration.

And he went straight to Remus, straight to Remus as if a magnet drew them together, and he clasped Remus's bound hands in his with an intimate smile that made Bill's hands itch to claw it away.

'Monsieur Lupin,' the dandy said. 'To stand here with you is a thing I have imagined a hundred times. The reality surpasses those fancies. You are as magnificent as I dreamed.'

'No-one touches him again.'

'You may defend yourself as you see fit,' the dandy promised, but already he was drawing Remus away, past the dead man and toward the house. The crowd parted for them. 'Come, you must be tired from your journey. Wine, liquor? Some English tea, perhaps? Or breakfast, or a bath?'

Remus stopped at the steps. At Greyback's side. Greyback didn't return his look, not for a long strange minute. But then Remus extended his hands. They hung there in the air between them. Then Greyback inhaled, as if he'd just remembered how, and reached up, jerkily, to slice his knife through the rope that bound Remus. The rope didn't fall, after. Greyback held it, loosely coiled in his lap.

'He's mine,' Remus said.

'As you like,' the dandy answered. 'But come, be at your ease. We are so very glad to have you with us.' And he pulled Remus along with him, up through the doors, and that was that.

Bill swallowed on a dry throat. The knife Dex had been about to use to murder Bill laid on the ground beside his body. Bill snatched it up. No-one stopped him. But they were all watching him, watched him fumble to cut his bindings, fumble to sheathe the knife somewhere on his person. It fell right through his belt at first attempt, and he ducked, red-cheeked, to grab it up again. Into his pocket, for now, and he hoped he wouldn't stab himself with it. No-one parted ways for him, and he had to circle and sidle and squeeze through the crowd, all of them looking at him, faces unreadable to him. More than one had flared nostrils as he passed, as if they smelled him whether they liked it or not. And Greyback. Greyback was there, Bill had to pass him, and it wasn't just his imagination that Greyback saw him, recognised him, remembered him. Teeth and blood.

Bill passed him, and went inside.

 

 

**

 

 

They were given a bedroom with an ensuite. It overlooked a shaggy garden, a mildewed pool, a broken fountain on which a lawn chair and a one-wheeled bicycle perched like drunken pranks. Bill stood staring out the window. It was barred.

It was nearing afternoon when Remus came in. Bill had seen him out there, being led on a tour by the dandy. The passage of footsteps outside the door had Bill tensing, wary of intrusion, three or four times, but there'd been none for an hour at least when the latch suddenly turned and the door finally opened. Bill levelled the knife.

Remus tossed him his wand. Bill let out a breath that had stalled somewhere in his gut last night when it had been taken off him. 'Thanks,' he said.

Remus turned flat eyes around the room. Noted the peeling wallpaper, the sagging velveteen sofa with stuffing being slowly colonised by mice, the canopy bed missing its drapes. He angled for a look into the ensuite, found it empty, and went there with leaden steps. Bill followed far enough to see him running the faucet. Water dripped red into the sink from his hands. They were shaking. The old cake of soap clattered into the porcelain bowl.

'So who is he?' Bill asked the stiff back facing him. 'The dandy.'

'Vaillancourt,' Remus said, or something like that-- it was hard to hear him mumbling at his hands. 'Lord of somewhere. He's the leader, such as there is one.'

'This is a pack?'

'No, it's not a bloody pack.'

'I just want to know what the hell is happening. Why even bring me with you--'

'You volunteered, rather forcefully, as I remember it.'

'So this is all for my benefit? You refusing to talk, refusing to treat me like--'

'Bill,' Remus said, bracing himself on the sink's edge. 'Please just be quiet.'

Bill stood hesitating. He couldn't even decide whether to come or go. Go where? Out the barred window, maybe. He wondered, then, whether the bars were there to keep him in, or to keep the werewolves out. 'Why did they want you here? They knew you. That Lord Whoever practically idolises you. How?'

Remus splashed his face and shut off the faucet. Wearily, he said, 'Do you want me to lie to you? It won't help you in the long run, but I can understand the truth being too much just now.'

That stung. 'I don't understand you. One minute you act like you care, the next you're cold as ice. I just want to help.'

'I know.' Remus dragged a cloth from a peg and dried his cheeks. 'I'm sorry. Whatever that's worth. I'm... I'm sorry for more than you'll ever know.'

'What did you do?' Bill asked him tentatively. 'It's about the war, isn't it? You kept the werewolves out of the war, but that's not the end of the story.'

'No. Unfortunately it's not.'

'Just--' Bill reached, and connected despite the flinch that ticced across Remus's face. He pulled, and Remus came to him, shuffling into his hold. Bill scratched at the soft hair on the nape of Remus's neck, and joint by joint Remus eased out of the rigid tension that had seized his every muscle. God, Bill thought, saddened and confused and wishing there was more he could do.

But that was the point, wasn't it. He was here to do more. And Remus wasn't letting him.

'I don't think you killed him because you're a werewolf.'

'No. You just think I couldn't stop because I am one.'

'That isn't true.' He made Remus look at him, framing his face with gentle fingers. 'Thank you. You saved my life.'

'I would do it again,' Remus said.

There was no answer to that other than to kiss him. Arms came about him, clutching him hard.

'Bed,' Bill whispered, and led him out by the hand.

There was too much worry unabated to allow them to completely abandon good sense. There were still people passing in the hall, and there was no real reason for that other than curiosity about them, or something darker than curiosity. Bill pushed Remus down on the mattress-- it whinged in protest-- but he didn't let it stop him unbuckling Remus's belt, unzipping his fly, and sliding his jeans down long legs. He crawled over him, welcomed by a warm mouth, hands on his buttons, knees spreading wide to invite him in.

After, Bill pillowed his cheek on Remus's arm, idly stroking the thick hair on Remus's chest. It followed a line down his belly, circled the hollow of his navel, went uninterrupted all the way to his thighs. Except for a patch on his hip. It was a scar. Deep enough that he could map it with his fingertips. The unusual texture of it drew his attention, and he traced it, trying to imagine what could have caused such an injury.

Remus twined their fingers, exerting the tenderest of pressure on his hand. 'You might be the closest thing I've got to a brother,' he said.

'How so?'

Remus rolled his head on the dusty duvet to look at him. 'You know who gave me that.'

Gave him the scar. The bite. It was a bite, a werewolf's bite. And though Remus never said the name, Bill did know. It explained everything. He nodded slowly.

Remus kissed his knuckles. Kissed his thumb. Licked his hand. Applied just the barest edge of his teeth.

'Yes,' Bill breathed.

Remus bit down slowly, the pressure increasing moment to moment til Bill discovered he was gritting his teeth against pain, but they never blinked, neither of them. But just when it began to really hurt, Remus released him abruptly. He was gone from the bed immediately after, disappearing into the bath with the door slamming shut behind him. Bill fell flat against the mattress, dazed, heart racing.

He checked his hand. Whitened marks of teeth deep in the flesh. But no broken skin.

Fuck.


	4. Three

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> who talked continuously seventy hours from park to pad to bar to  
> Bellevue to museum to the Brooklyn Bridge,  
> a lost battalion of platonic conversationalists jumping down the  
> stoops off fire escapes off windowsills of Empire State out  
> of the moon,  
> yacketayakking screaming vomiting whispering facts and  
> memories and anecdotes and eyeball kicks and shocks of  
> hospitals and jails and wars
> 
> ~Howl, by Allen Ginsberg

Bill zipped his denims, buckled his belt. 'So what do we do today?'

'Whatever they suggest.' Remus straightened his collar, gave his damp hair a negligent brush out of his face. He needed, Bill thought, a good shave-- there were men who could pull off rugged, but Remus would be most of the way to bearded by evening.

'Whatever they suggest,' Bill repeated. That was most of what he seemed to do with Remus, and it was driving him mad. He gave himself a breath to get it together, buttoning his shirt, shoving the tails down his pants. 'What if what they suggest is not what I'd prefer to do?'

'Then you come find me.'

'You'll let them separate us?'

'They'll leave you alone now. They know my limit.'

'They know the consequences, you mean.' Bill touched the knife laying on the duvet. 'Do I have to ask if you killed a man so they'd have your measure?'

Remus's head turned up. It was almost a fight. Almost. Remus looked away, and that was that.

Bill wet his lips. 'Sorry,' he said, inadequate, deeply.

'Talk to anyone who'll talk to you,' Remus said briefly, and came to him, then, that was a rather extraordinary gesture of forgiveness, given the magnitude of what Bill had just accused him of doing. Of being capable of doing. Remus came to him, took up the knife from the bed, and did something with a flick of his wrist that broke the metal hilt in two and swung it in a circle to click shut over the blade. 'It's a Muggle weapon,' Remus said, unclipping it and showing Bill how to do it. 'Probably most of them here will be Muggles, and you should have a Muggle weapon, especially one you can conceal. Practise this, when you're alone in here.' He flexed his wrist, open-close-open-closed the blade, and patiently corrected Bill when he fumbled his first try. 'Don't worry about looking suave. Speed is the most important thing, and accuracy-- you want it ready to use the moment you have a need to reach for it. The boot is a good place, or the small of the back. Never in the same place as your wand, or you can be disarmed all at the once. Trust me, you never want to be disarmed amongst these people.'

'Helpless, you mean.'

'You're only helpless if you freeze up. Don't do that, either.'

Easily said. Less readily avoided. Bill flicked the knife closed, narrowly avoiding his own fingers, and tucked the newly compact little blade into his boot. 'S'pose I'm ready, then. As I'll ever be.'

'Just look, and listen. They won't be jumping to exposit all their plans in one handy presentation. We're here to learn, and to pass on what we learn, and that's all.'

'Not to keep them out of the war?'

'Or to lead them to a position where they'll hurt us less. But that's for later. For now--'

'Right.'

'Bill.'

'Remus,' he said, and walked past Remus to the door. He unlocked it, and didn't let himself pause for a deep breath before he opened it and put himself through it.

He made it all of a metre on that righteous steampower. Greyback was in the hall. Straight across from their door. He met Bill's eyes. Then his gaze slid onward, to Remus, who bumped into Bill's back and then stood there, his breath warm on Bill's neck.

In the pale light of morning Greyback looked like an unwashed old man of the type who loitered in the seedier taverns up Knockturn Alley. There were manky sweat stains on his sagging undershirt, the underarms of his dirty coat that hung open from his bulky shoulders. He swigged from a flask, then offered it, casual as you please.

'No, thanks,' Remus said. 'A bit early for me.'

'You never could hold your liquor.' Greyback capped it and stuffed it negligently into a pocket. 'Cosy sleep?'

'Lumpy mattress.'

Greyback bared yellow teeth in a silent laugh. 'I'll pass it on to management.'

'Do.' Remus stepped out from behind Bill, closed their door. 'You look like shit,' he said, his tone pointedly cordial. 'The showers do work.'

'The dirt keeps the fleas away.' Greyback tracked Remus's movement, the two small steps he took that put him in front of Bill, protective and not bothering to hide it. 'You always were a soft touch, RJ. You ought to leash your pets.'

Bill didn't need the tense line of Remus's shoulders to warn him off a hot retort. Greyback was needling him, sure enough, his whiskey-coloured eyes eager for a reason to do more than just poke and prod. Bill bit his tongue, bit til it hurt.

'House trained, eh,' Greyback smirked. 'A little young for you, int he?'

'A little old for  _you_.'

Greyback moved. Bill couldn't contain his flinch, stepped back til his shoulders bumped the door and he discovered his hand clenched on his drawn wand, but he might as well not have existed at all for as much attention as Greyback turned on him. There was a deadly but undeclared war in the offing, not beyond the walls of this manor, but contained to two bodies facing off within it. Greyback put his big hand about Remus's neck. Thumb over his pulse point, then sliding up to the jaw, pressing so hard that the skin beneath it whitened. But Remus would not yield. He would not tilt his head, though the pressure of that heavy hand must have been immense.

'No,' he said, just that, not even particularly loud. But it had all the effect of a thunderclap, of a stunning spell, of a slap to the face. Greyback released him, fell back a step. About-faced and with nothing more stalked off, his hand clenched at his side.

Bill remembered to breathe. It trembled on the exhale. 'Are you all-- are you all right?'

'I'm fine.' So slight Bill might be imagining it, that faint frogginess. Remus's adam's apple bobbed in a swallow. 'Let's go.'

He didn't wait, either. He went off in Greyback's wake, toward the stairs, and didn't look back, assuming or expecting Bill would follow. But Bill did, so that was that.

 

 

**

 

 

Bill had been in old and even grand houses before-- Great Aunt Muriel maintained the old Prewett lands in all their ever-fading glory, a sprawling estate with no occupants but a fusty old woman and her fustier house elf, both wings and half the main house shut down with no-one to live in it, a museum of dusty Pureblood relics. Grimmauld Place was worse off and that had been abandoned barely a dozen years; there was something about Wizarding spaces that needed life, needed to be used, needed some spark that was dying out with the old ways. This place was like that, plaster and paint chipping away from the corners, mildew in waves of green on the ceilings, drafts where there shouldn't be and airless everywhere else. But now in daylight Bill saw it as more than just an old house gone to seed. The house was a warren. A den. And the animals who had colonised it were predators in need of prey for all those strong appetites.

There was a kitchen, and a boy of fourteen or fifteen who stood over the old Victorian stove frying eggs in a cast iron pan. Without a word he made a plate for each of them, crisped toast with a generous scrape of drippings from the pan, a dozen thick rashers of bacon, a gammon steak, several well-burnt bangers, black pudding, four eggs apiece. Even Molly Weasley would have thought it was overkill. But Remus took it with a nod, and carried his breakfast through a low-hanging passageway to a dining room. Bill followed at his heels, ducking his head, and emerged to find himself in a formal hall, high ceilings strung with cobwebs thick as ropes to swaddle an enormous crystal chandelier. Portraits lined the hall, but not Wizarding portraits, and Bill wondered at that, what Muggles saw in pictures that never moved, never spoke. Faded pale-faced women in satin gowns gazed across eternity at nothing, clutching small dogs and fans to their white bosoms.

Remus sat himself. Across the table from Greyback.

Challenge or detente? There was no knowing from their faces. Or maybe it wasn't deliberate. The only two contiguous open chairs happened to be there. Accident or fate, then. He sat, too, pulling his chair in to the table and a few inches closer to Remus.

'Coffee or tea?'

A girl not much older than the kitchen cook. She pushed a handcart with several pots and a rack of ceramic mugs. Bill tried to get a good look at her, but she ducked his gaze, her ashy hair falling over her face.

'Tea,' Remus said, 'and milk, please,' and accepted the cup she poured him. Bill took a black coffee, and she trundled off, shuffling awkwardly on heeled shoes that appeared to be somewhat too large for her, as if she were a child playing fancy dress with her mum's clothes. It was the shoes that led his eyes-- all up the length of the table, men and women alike, they were all wearing shoes that seemed ill-fitting or oddly chosen. The woman to Bill's right had satin ankle boots laced tight under rolled-up stone wash denims. The man on the other side of her had Oxfords in what was clearly dragon hide, and far and away more expensive than the boots Bill had bought himself on his twenty-first birthday. Feigning to drop his napkin, Bill bent for a look under the table, and found the row of shoes facing him from across the table to be of the same type. Dress heels for the women, a few men like the Count of Monte Cristo who--

Who was standing at Bill's side when he straightened up, napkin in hand.

' _Bonjour à tous,_ ' the dandy greeted the table at large, who responded by rising to their feet, all of them, and bowing or courtseying. Caught off his guard, Bill looked to Remus-- Remus did not rise. Bill mimicked him. Greyback, he noted, also did not rise.

' _Bonjour,_ Monsieur Lupin,' the dandy said then, bestowing a dazzling smile on Remus. 'I hope you are enjoying your meal.'

'Thank you,' Remus said, taking a bite of his toast. 'I am.'

'Be seated, friends,' the dandy instructed the werewolves.

'Thank you, Monsieur Vaillancourt,' the werewolves replied, chorusing like schoolchildren, and then it was back to normal, the scrapes of chair legs on the wooden floor thunderous, followed by the renewed clink of silverware on plates. China, Bill noted then, and not a bad set, as fine or finer even than what Mum saved for Christmas and Easter. And the silver was exquisite, now he looked at it. Even the napkin he'd pretended to drop was fine linen, edged in what looked like hand-loomed lace. This place made no sense.

The dandy was seating himself, now, at the head of the table. The girl with the cart brought him a coffee, and the kitchen boy appeared with another plate, though this one wasn't loaded down with enough protein and cholesterol to kill a hungry jungle lion. A croissant, a half a grapefruit, a few artistically arranged slices of cheese. Garnished with a sprig of mint dusted with sugar.

'If you are well rested,' Vaillancourt said, taking a delicate sip of his coffee, 'I would like to explain our plans to you. In full, if you would grant me the time.'

Remus choked a little on his tea. Bill took a certain amount of good cheer from that. 'Not wasting any time, I gather,' Remus said, just slightly hoarse.

'That will depend on you, Monsieur. But I have no doubt of your abilities.' Vaillancourt took a bite of his grapefruit. 'If you prefer a different menu, I can send for the cook,' he offered. 'Most of our family here are very English in their tastes.'

'I'm afraid I've not much of an appetite most times.'

'But you are far too thin, Monsieur,' Vaillancourt scolded him amiably, and did call for the cook, which resulted in grapefruit for Bill, since Remus immediately passed it on. It was, presumably, the safest thing Bill had ever eaten, given the cow eyes Vaillancourt was making at Remus; he'd hardly poison his schoolboy crush object.

Still, though, it was hard to feel all that safe with Greyback sat across the table from him, eating ham with his fingers and staring at Remus like he could eat his soul if only Remus would look at him.

 

 

 

Somewhat surprisingly, no-one objected to Bill tagging along after breakfast. It was, in a strange way, akin to being invisible. No-one objected because no-one seemed to notice him at all. Vaillancourt led the way, his arm linked with Remus's and his silly shoes clattering on the dusty marble stairs. Greyback followed, glowering, his big hands stuffed in his pockets. Bill followed after that, at a wary distance, but they left the door open for him, so Bill went through it, drawing it shut behind him, and found himself a place to stand against the wall.

Given the state of the rest of the place, it was something of a shock to see how well-appointed the office was. 'Office'-- it was probably the size of the dining room directly below, and decorated in fine leather, cherry wood panelling, curtains of jacquard green over the large windows. The executive desk was one of those massive antiques, a heavy blocky thing that couldn't possibly have been brought up the stairs all in one piece, not by Muggle means. An even more massive bookcase behind it spread across the entirety of the back wall, tall stained glass doors forming a jewel-like kaleidoscope of light on the faces of the men standing there in a little clump, looking down at a book open on the desk.

Remus dragged a finger down the page. 'This is a register,' he said softly.

'Of all known werewolves in your United Kingdom,' Vaillancourt confirmed. 'We're still conducting the European census.' He seated himself in the gilded, not at all incidentally throne-like chair behind the desk, and graciously waved his guests to the brocade wingbacks facing him. There were only two, but, again, no-one seemed to be minding Bill's existence; he was just part of the furniture. So he kept his spot, craning his head trying to see this register. It looked like one of Gringotts' accounting ledgers, longer and thinner than standard books. It was open a little less than midway. Were all the previous pages full? That could be hundreds of names, thousands, even, if there were no additional information recorded.

Remus must have been thinking the same thing. But he leapt over contemplating the problem and rewound to the cause. He looked at Greyback and said, voice dull and hard and something muddier than that all at once, 'They can't all be yours.'

Bill's mouth went dry. He caught himself touching the edge of his wound. He dropped his hand to grip his wand in his belt, instead.

'Even if I wanted to, sweetheart, can't be in that many places at once.'

'Fine. Not all yours. Your idea, though.'

'Fenrir has been instrumental in expanding our reach. He is our best recruiter, you might say.' Vaillancourt smiled. 'The foundation is quantity. We need a critical mass of werewolves. Volume. Through sustained effort, we have surpassed our most modest goals. We could use a few hundred more for safety, but.' He gave a Gallic shrug, an elegant lift of a beringed hand. 'That, we may yet have enough time to accomplish. But we must move onto the next stage in good order. So you find us here.'

'Doing what?' Bill asked.

The slightest tic. The dandy's mouth went tight, though it went on smiling. He was a cool one under pressure, that was sure. Greyback's attention came to him, brief at first, then suddenly appraising. Bill forced himself to meet those whiskey-coloured eyes.

'Doing what,' Remus echoed.

'Surely you know. You must have guessed.'

'I don't play guessing games.'

'When there were fewer of us, we had to choose our targets based on our ability to access them. We had to be born fit to our purpose-- or fit after what had been done to us, shall we say. Able to hide it. Or to manipulate it. Use it to manipulate others. We learnt that from you, Monsieur Lupin.'

Greyback's gaze turned first. Bill's was only a second behind, as he registered that. Learnt that from Remus? His time at Hogwarts, the very public way he'd been run out once his identity was published in the _Prophet_? Did they think he'd hidden it on purpose-- for what reason? The number of people who knew the reason was Harry Potter were confined to the Order of the Phoenix. Outside that secret, what might it look like, a werewolf making his way into the sheltered ivory towers of the finest Wizarding school in Britain? Did it look like a plot? That had ended going on, what, eighteen months? Twenty? They'd created all this, whatever all this was, in just that amount of time, based on whatever they thought Remus had been up to?

Remus's face was cold. From a distance, it looked impregnable, that face. But his hands were white on the arms of his chair.

'What is it exactly you're doing here then?' Bill pressed, since Remus wasn't. Hadn't he told Bill to talk to whoever would talk to them? And here they were, willing to talk. If not quite to Bill.

'Education,' said the dandy. 'Manners. The refinements-- dancing, conversation, the little elegances that allow one free movement amongst the upper classes. Clothes. A comfort with luxury, an _entitlement_ to luxury. Like them.'

'Like who?'

Again, Vaillancourt addressed himself to Remus, not Bill. 'Like the Pureblood wizards who dominate the government, the schools, society itself.'

'This is strange revolution,' Remus said flatly. 'Setting up werewolves to imitate their betters. To what end?'

'To replace them.'

'And how do you propose to effect that replacement? Make enough of us to outnumber them? Why? To what purpose? Are we going to be suddenly voted into the Wizengamot? Granted all the rights we've been denied for centuries? What happens when they realise it's all a deception? That we've lied and deceived them and infiltrated them? They'll cast us out again and probably do their level best to scourge us from the earth in the process.' Remus stood abruptly, shoving himself to his feet in an economy of movement expressive of repressed-- emotion, unknowable. Remus crossed the office, aimed straight at Bill, and without a word he put a hand in Bill's pocket and removed the cigarette carton. He paused long enough to touch a tender finger to Bill's chin, brushing his lips, dry and warm, over Bill's cheek, and then he was turning away before Bill could more than register surprise at such a public show of affection. 'Anyone have a match?' Remus muttered, tapping a stick against the box to pack the tobacco, slipping another over his ear.

Greyback pulled a matchbook from his coat. It sailed through the air, snatched out of its trajectory by Remus's catch. Remus lit one and his cigarette in the same motion, shaking it out and leaving the burnt nub on the stand of an antique urn. Smoke blew hard out of his nostrils, agitation of some kind, but it didn't express itself in words til Remus had nearly finished the cigarette.

'It's not about them,' Remus said.

'For a man who does not play guessing games, you have a gift, Monsieur.'

'No. I've fought this war already.'

'As I said. We learnt from your example.'

'This is not my example. I wanted them dead. I didn't want to become them.'

'Purebloods?' Bill said, startled.

'Death Eaters.'

'I understand the temperament of your political leanings, Monsieur,' Vaillancourt strove to console Remus, and got nothing but a stream of smoke in return. 'But it is your very strategy, I assure you. What greater triumph for our kind could there be than to supplant the very men who have cast us out for centuries? I have the purest of intentions, Monsieur, as I believe you have as well, and I would be honoured to be your compatriot as we rise to take what should be ours. Will you join me, Remus, if I may presume to call you by your given name before invited?'

'I'm neither a Pureblood nor a Death Eater, you can call me whatever the hell you want,' Remus said. He lit the ciggy over his ear with the butt of the first and ground out the butt on the windowsill. 'What you're doing. Say it succeeds. We stand at the right hand of the Dark Lord. We become party to every damning deed he commits. And he won't thank us for it. He will discard us at the earliest opportunity, and why wouldn't he? A man who believes bloodline is second only to willingness to kiss his arse is never going to lift monsters to the same level as wizards. He expects us to be dogs who obey his every command. What do you do with a dog that won't obey any more? You whip it til it turns on you, and then you put it down.' He blew a puff of smoke. 'And I would rather die than serve him.'

At least, that was what Remus ranted at him later. Bill listened, and understood, and agreed, because how could he otherwise? But in the moment he watched Remus smoke the last of the cigarettes like a man drawing his last breaths, and had some sense, now, of what this was going to cost them. If he'd ever imagined the life of a double agent was anything other than glamourous, he hadn't imagined this, the dire crossroads of something you'd fought for your entire life and the requirement to profess its polar opposite. With enthusiasm. It explained quite a lot about Severus Snape's perpetual foul mood.

There in the moment, Vaillancourt sat there oozing charm and smiling winningly, and Remus stubbed out the cigarette in his hand, and turned with his head bowed. 'I can't take credit for this stratagem,' he said. 'You've gone far and away beyond anything I imagined. I never... I've never believed werewolves could come out of the shadows. This is more than strategy, this is... vision.'

'It would be immodest not to admit I stand on the shoulders of those who have brought our kind this far.' Vaillancourt sat forward, hand on the register's pages. 'Do not undersell yourself, sir. You were the first to imagine we could gain something by uniting-- that we could be more together than we were apart and alone. Let me now bring you into our brotherhood, so that you no longer live in exile away from us. We have desperate need of you.'

'Need of me?' Remus smiled. It was small, but it was a marvellous little piece of acting, really; it was long-smothered longing, that look, a reluctance to be taken for a fool once more. It was an artful look, that, because, Bill thought, it was entirely true. It just wouldn't find its answer here, with these people he should have been able to find his home.

'You straddle three worlds. Wizard. Muggle. Wolf. What is the one barrier to moving between those worlds?'

'The third world,' Remus said dryly.

'Non, my friend.' Vaillancourt closed the register, tapped the cover. 'It is only a curse,' he murmured through a small smile, 'if we lack the ability to control its timing.'

Remus blinked at this. 'Control... when,' he repeated slowly.

'When, yes. We are constrained by the moon. But remove that constraint? If we could effect our transformation whenever we wanted, at will, what might we accomplish?'

'How?'

'If any could discover the means, Remus, it would be you.'

No acting required, now. Remus looked taken utterly aback, utterly stymied at this unexpected vote of confidence. 'I assure you,' he stammered, 'I don't-- I'm not--'

'You are a wizard of considerable talent. We have reports of your accomplishments; you can conjure a corporeal Patronus, you can Apparate long distances, you are a deadly duellist with a wand. The list of curses and offencive spells in your arsenal has been observed to be quite broad and quite creative.'

Remus had gone still. Bill figured it out at a lag, too busy wondering if werewolves had somehow implanted a spy at Hogwarts to know so much about Remus. But it wasn't the werewolves who had spies. It was the Dark Lord's people. The children in the school who reported home to their fathers, who went out into the night robed and masked to do battle at the Department of Mysteries.

They knew he was Phoenix. They knew Remus wasn't on their side. And suddenly Bill quite completely understood why he'd been brought along and allowed to listen as Vaillancourt laid out their intentions. A hostage to Remus's good behaviour. A hostage to his cooperation, willing or otherwise.

When Greyback reached into his pocket, Bill tensed, fearing the worst. Perhaps Remus did, as well, because he rose, just slightly, only to stop himself. Greyback had not drawn a weapon, nor even his flask. A bit of crumpled newsprint. Remus took it tentatively, smoothing it flat on his knee. His fingers lingered on it.

'That posh school of yours,' Greyback rumbled. 'You were good at it.'

Remus covered the photograph of himself with a palm. 'I was good at it,' he agreed softly, his voice cracking.

'The first werewolf to ever graduate from Hogwarts,' Vaillancourt said. 'The first werewolf to teach there. Be the man who ensures you are not the last.'

 

 

 

'Do you think their plan will work?'

Remus had only picked desultorily at the chicken they'd been served. The kitchen boy had delivered it, a rather prettily plated bird stuffed with chestnuts and figs and slicked with port wine sauce, plump roasted potatoes alternated with halved pomegranates arranged on the side. It had come with a bottle of French wine that Remus speared with a sour glare and refused to drink. He changed his mind by the time Bill had finished a glass, let Bill fill the other goblet for him and bring it to him where he stood on the balcony, moody as a gargoyle.

'It could work,' Remus said now, swirling the last swallow of bordeaux and downing it. He rested on his elbows on the railing, scowling out at the yard below. 'Purebloods are just people. People can be turned against their own self-interest with surprisingly little effort. There are dozens of stories of werewolves being exposed in the highest positions-- that's why there's so many laws banning us from society these days. There's nothing saying it would be easy, but maybe there's merit to the idea. If there's enough of us, and we're everywhere, it's going to be a lot harder to root us out one by one.'

Bill made a noise of uneasy agreement. It wasn't a pleasant realisation, but he had to admit the notion of werewolves openly parading the wizarding world sent his skin crawling. He hadn't been raised to persecute those different than him, but there hadn't really been a lot of people different from him in his world. Respecting Remus Lupin was easy, he was affable and intelligent and useful to have about, that was sure, but til the Battle of the Department of Mysteries Bill hadn't honestly thought much of him being a werewolf. And it was a hard thing now to realise Remus had been at pains to ensure that very attitude. He could only do what he did, walk where he walked, sit in their company if he was everything and a werewolf, not a werewolf and everything else. And how easy it had been to shrug over his explusion from Hogwarts. Even the children complaining he'd been their only good Defence teacher in years had only occasioned a shrug. It was good he'd been competent, good he'd been there to help Harry and Sirius, but altogether better he was no longer there now the truth was out.

Remus was looking at him when Bill cleared his throat. Mutely he took Bill's hand in his. Bill was glad of it, glad he didn't ask for Bill's thoughts, glad he didn't know why Bill blushed now, ashamed at himself for being grateful.

'Controlling the transformation, though,' Bill said, when he had control enough to manage it. 'I don't see how it could be done.' Remus went to drink, found his glass empty, and sighed. 'No,' Bill said, amazed. 'You've already solved it?'

'Get the wine, will you?'

'Remus.' He squeezed the hand in his. 'How?'

The library behind them seemed empty, tomb-like, with Vaillancourt and Greyback long since departed. The sunlight didn't penetrate as deeply now with the sun well behind the tall eaves of the roof, evening coming on, and what little remained only illuminated the dust in the air, as if no-one had populated this place in decades. It had a musty, closed-in smell to it. Like a prison cell. Their prison, now. They wouldn't be leaving it til Remus had accomplished this monumental task he'd been set.

'You know how Sirius escaped Azkaban?'

'Something about slipping through the bars as... as a dog.' It struck him, then, what Remus meant. 'The Animagus transformation? You think that can work with the werewolf curse? They wouldn't-- I dunno-- cancel out somehow?'

'I don't know. To my admittedly limited knowledge, it's never been tried. If it has been, it's never been recorded. Gone like so much other history of people on the edges.'

'But you're not an Animagus?'

'No. He and James and Peter did it in secret, I never knew what they were up to. I don't suppose it occurred to them I might learn it too, or that it would be dangerous if I did.'

'Might it be? Dangerous? I mean if a werewolf becomes an Animagus wouldn't he be a werewolf still, not some other animal?'

'I don't know, but it's certainly a possibility.'

'Then you can't,' Bill said. 'You can't help them do this.'

'Get the wine, please,' Remus said, and Bill obeyed, figuring a drink was damn well warranted after that statement. The solution was in front of them and they were still doomed. He poured himself a glass, carried the bottle back with him and filled Remus's with the remainder. Remus gulped at it, til Bill put an arm about his neck and pressed his mouth to Remus's temple.

'We can escape,' he whispered against the hair soft on his lips. 'We can run back to Phoenix, hide out for a while.'

'No.'

'No? Remus--'

'Who do you think they'll ask if I don't do it?'

He let go. Faced the railing once more, the overgrown lawn with the dead garden of brown vines and bramble. 'That's a hell of a line to walk, Remus.'

A hand settled on the small of his back, thumb stroking over his spine. 'You could go. I think they'd let you go. Or at least not chase you if you ran.'

'And leave you here alone with them?'

'You don't owe me that.'

He gave it real thought. To his everlasting shame. Only a moment, only a moment's doubt, but he did doubt, doubt himself and his ability to do this, survive this. But then he turned and Remus stood there, forgiveness in his touch, already saying good-bye, and Bill found something like-- not courage, exactly. Determination, maybe. A fair universe wouldn't put Remus through this alone. And Bill was the only one with the power to decide how alone Remus was going to be. So he chose.

Remus's lips tasted of wine and tobacco. His heart was hammering, hammering in his chest, pressed tight to Bill's.

 


End file.
